BY CAPRICE LAWLESS

The coronavirus pandemic has hit. The nation and the economy are in a free fall. Your college has closed and your college administration is announcing how there is nothing to see over here because the faculty—those miraculous, mythical, shapeshifting creatures—have morphed overnight from classroom teachers to “online educators” engaged in “online learning” on behalf of Western Civilization. This is all bunk and it’s dangerous for reasons too numerous to count. The AAUP issued a formal statement on the peril a few weeks ago. Please take a deep breath (six feet away from anyone!) and stop.

“Maintenance Required” by Samntha Celera, Flickr

Uncommon and beautiful is the natural impulse of faculty to turn ourselves inside-out in a crisis on behalf of our students, on behalf of knowledge and learning. That impulse is on overload right now. The button flashing on the dashboard of my mind is the red “Maintenance Required” counterpart to the one in my Honda. It is forcing me to think about how we lost many civil liberties in the wake of 9/11.

We are most certainly in uncharted territory. All the more reason not to spend the weekend watching webinars to learn how to screen-cast, open online discussion groups, record your lectures, post your curriculum online, etc. This is not the time to throw your intellectual property onto the bonfire of COVID-19.

What most of us are forced to do right now is to teach stripped-down correspondence courses. My heart goes out to those whose teaching depends on equipment, laboratories, and necessary machines. Imagine how difficult the task is before them. We in the humanities (and most of us are adjuncts), who normally teach in classrooms, are performing various forms of a giant downshift. We will explain to classes in bare-bone ways the forthcoming assignments through online platforms or in emails. We will harvest their assignments and grade them however we are able to do so, using whatever tools are available to us wherever we are. To do so by whatever means is not a sign of weakness, but of strength. To do so showcases our mastery and flexibility. But you need to protect that flexibility so that it is not misconstrued as yet another easy avenue for exploitation. Your tendency will be to overdo. Fight that tendency as if your career depends on it, because it does.

Case in point: I am teaching three research-writing courses this spring. I have no shame, so I’ll admit here how I will carry on with it. I will explain the assignment for the week in a brief note to students via our online platform. I will collect assignments via an online drop box. I will print out those that need lots of marking-up, but only those. I will mark them up the old-fashioned way; pen to paper. I will post grades in the online gradebook. To the rare student who challenges a grade, I will email a note or will send the marked-up copy via US mail. While I know how to use track changes in Word, it is, for me, when it comes to assessing student work, as useful as are fleas to a dog, and just as annoying. To my peers who dig it, well then, dig on I say, and open yourself up to tracking changes on countless papers well into June. For me, to do so would allow my already low wages to plummet all the way back to what I was earning per hour mowing lawns in high school.

More importantly, educators, students, and the general public need to understand the Grand Canyon-sized chasm between a slapped-together-at-the-last-minute correspondence course like the one I describe above, and a true, rich, fantastically varied online course. To teach online properly is to make use of the many online tools, and to set up all those videos, discussion rooms, interactive assignments, and grading tools before the term begins. A great online course is going to be as rich and varied in its own particular way, as is a face-to-face course. It is utterly unlike classroom teaching. I’ve done both, so I know. My point in writing today is to urge adjunct faculty and any administrators reading to reinforce a shared understanding of the vast differences between classroom teaching and teaching online, and to avoid referring to what we are forced to do now as “online teaching.” Most of us will be communicating online, plain and simple. The need for this reinforcement is only exacerbated by the way decisions by administrators in this crisis have been made devoid of faculty consultation in so many instances.

Adjunct faculty, especially, are in peril if distinctions between classroom and online teaching disappear during this crisis, and thus further shorten higher education. My college has already become the junk drawer of higher education, with preening fat cats at the top boasting a mission of success and happiness to all, and all of it delivered by an army of valiant, unseen, unknown, unprotected and vastly underpaid adjuncts. In a single classroom at Front Range Community College now, for example, we have ninth-grade students with limited emotional and social ability, alongside returning vets who drove ambulances in war zones, sitting beside blind and deaf students, recruits from homeless shelters who can neither read nor write, and people released from psychiatric hospitals who explain to me, for example, that they can’t do any assignments because of their recent suicide attempt. It is not uncommon in that same class to have ESL learners who have no grasp of English grammar or syntax, but who are placed, nevertheless, in advanced composition because the former definition of “course requirement” has been re-framed as an “obstacle to student success.” One peer untrained in special education is scrambling to somehow accommodate, in one class, two deaf students as well as a student whose primary form of communication is typing with her toes.

I try to imagine, today, this same assortment of students now thrown into “online learning” delivered by ostensibly and magically transformed “online educators.” How odd that at the very moment scientists carefully identify and isolate elements of the coronavirus to create a vaccine, colleges are blurring two vastly different categories of teaching, and thus opening yet more uncontrolled, underfunded, undefined something-or-others, to be taught by the unknown what’s-his-names and what’s-her-faces adjunct faculty down the hall.

Guest blogger Caprice Lawless is first-vice-president of the AAUP, chair of the committee on contingency and the profession, and adjunct faculty at Front Range Community College, Westminster Campus. She leads the AAUP Colorado Conference’s community college project.